Some cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, etc. are so spread out that providing reasonable public transportation, even if people are paying, is impossible. Europe has dense urban cores in their cities, and even car-centric German cities haven't spread out so much that providing transportation is a problem. A place like Dallas with zero natural boundaries has spread out to hundreds of square miles. In cities like that, public transportation isn't generally used as a way to get to work...it connects low-income housing with places of employment, hospitals and shopping areas because that's where the limited funds are best spent.
Other US cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington are at least candidates. Metro NY has a decent regional transportation system...there are 3 commuter railroads and several suburban bus lines, and a good amount of development has grown up around the rail lines. And of course, the city itself has subways and buses. Unless they absolutely need their cars to get around during the day, or are super-wealthy and don't care about parking costs, most people who are working normal-schedule jobs take the train or bus into the city. In other cities, you'd need way more than free fares to get people out of their cars.
Fare revenue from public transportation doesn't come anywhere close to paying for the real cost of running the system. Getting rid of it would make it even harder to run, unless everyone decided that it was a public good and should be paid for with taxes or reduced spending on roads. Also, people would have to understand that they can't externalize the cost of living on a 3-acre lot in a super-far flung suburb...making bigger roads just encourages more sprawl-based development. And that's a lifestyle change I don't think most Americans can handle.
There are _tons_ of stock and other investing scams that get carried out under the eyes of financial regulatory agencies...but you can bet there would be tons more if there were no regulation. You have to admit it's pretty brazen to just disappear with investors' money, not even pulling a Mt. Gox and claiming they were "hacked."
I would imagine that most of the "investors" in this ICO either had tons of play-money Bitcoins they didn't care about losing, or were starry-eyed latecomers drawn in by the Bitcoin millionaire stories in the press. It sucks for both groups, but this is what bubbles and unregulated markets get you. Plenty of fraudsters exist in the stock market, but at least they have to follow some rules and make up a plausible scheme to take investors' money. ICOs where the founders disappear to some non-extradition country with millions of dollars and can't even get a slap on the wrist fine enforced on them are just licenses to steal.
I wonder if Microsoft is trying to get around a scaling problem. If every company on Earth switches to Office 365, and they're basically forcing everyone this way, then they will control at least a portion of identity/login for most of the world. They're doing this with Azure AD right now, with every company either in a cloud-based or federated trust with their own tenant. I'm sure Azure AD is designed in a way that there's no single point of attack that could leak all users' credentials, but maybe the point of decentralizing it is actually to get the storage part off their hands while still controlling the process.
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(OK, in all seriousness...if they're talking about mainframes and COBOL underpinning almost everything they do, I might agree.) This just sounds like a study by a consulting firm [[looks-- oh yes, it is!]] planting the seeds of doubt in executives' heads to get the purse strings loosened. Traditional companies are totally in Fear of Missing Out mode and the consulting companies are cashing in on that.
This was also back when they really had a hold on their employees and actually wanted to keep them. I know several people who retired from a lifetime employed with IBM. And you're right...Rochester, MN, Burlington, VT, Boulder, CO, etc, were designed to be isolated enough so IBM controlled the labor pool but close enough so corporate types in cities could easily fly or drive there.
It makes sense when you think about it, but only if your goal is to retain talent. I think Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and all the other big tech employers these days just want a revolving door. I even remember a time where companies paid to move you internally for promotions or new job assignments rather than lose you.
I'm guessing that the main reason people are complaining is that they think Google is going to further drive up rents in NYC. Living near NYC, I can tell you that's not possible. San Francisco/SV is the only real estate market that is crazier in the US. Unless you want to live in a shoebox 400 ft^2 apartment, the average worker isn't going to be buying Midtown Manhattan real estate.
Are they worried that there's going to be an influx of 50,000 Googlers who are going to be demanding $300K+ to work there? I can see that...but it's not going to change anything. NYC is the home of the investment banking industry, where kids fresh out of MBA school are making millions a year. There's celebrities, corporate executives, etc. and the place is just swimming in money. Google AND Amazon coming in might make a further dent, but I doubt it. All it'd do is make the already unobtainable real estate further out of reach.
For those who don't remember Dotcom Bubble 1.0, there was a sizable chunk of craziness in NYC, and it was dubbed Silicon Alley. This was because Bubble 1.0 was all about getting the traditional publishers and media companies hooked in. What I wonder is whether Bubble 2.0 has enough air left for Google's move to make any dent.
I think there's a bunch of factors at work. - People working in Seattle, and SF/SV make tons of money because of that region's out-of-control housing market and other cost of living factors. - If this is recent data, don't forget that this is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Large Seattle/SF/SV employers heavily favor younger workers and hip startup types. So, on average the age of people reporting high salaries will be lower, while their salaries will be comparatively higher. Microsoft and Amazon are throwing money at people who can spell DevOps and cloud, and the insane development cadence ensures that workers are younger. If you can handle "Seattle Hundreds" year in and year out, and save your money, you will make out until the bubble pops. - The reality is that there is an upper limit to tech salaries no matter where you go. You have to be exceptional to get executive-level pay in places with normal cost of living. This either means you've invented something for the company, are literally holding the entire org together yourself, or are a consultant traveling 11 months out of the year deploying the newest hotness.
Now that I'm starting to hit that magic number (I'll be 45 in 2 years) this is starting to make sense. There is a constant downward pressure on wages and you have to stay relevant if you want to stay near the top. I like where I am in my career...I'm paid to keep up at a reasonable pace and enjoy being able to pass on wisdom to the new grads as they filter in. But no one should expect that they'll get beyond that cap, whatever it is for their specialty, unless they're willing to consult or hop jobs every six months for increases before the next recession hits.
Most taboos about suicide are religion-centric, but it's actually illegal to attempt and succeed. Why can't we just acknowledge that some people don't want to live anymore and actually help them out? Some obvious examples: - Someone dealing with a terminal illness that will destroy them slowly over many painful years, or destroy their minds like dementia or Alzheimer's disease - Someone facing a lifetime prison sentence - Someone who's so badly depressed, unable to affect it via medication or other means, and just done with life.
Less obvious examples include what's coming next...unfortunately, we're entering an era where doing everything right, getting a good education and keeping out of trouble doesn't guarantee stability. I work at a company that has a lot of long-term employees, and they're starting to lay them off in their 50s. Imagine being 55, 4.5 years from the age where you can start using your retirement accounts penalty-free and 7 years from the age where you can start drawing your Social Security benefits. The job you've been at for 20+ years kicks you out, and no one wants to hire you because of your age. If you can't get SS disability or something similar, your life is going to be miserable from that point on. Suicides among this group are definitely going to spike once automation really comes for all the knowledge workers.
Speaking as someone who works in a fairly slow-moving industry, producing software and systems that are critical to keep running, I can say we have a low "digital culture" score. When I hear digital culture, the image in my head is of a Silicon Valley web startup, employees clustered around an open-space "developer pod" with constant distractions. Everything is full DevOps, with developers making major changes to the system several times a day. All the while, you have messages coming in from email, Slack, Trello, Microsoft Teams, IMs, text messages, etc. and developers are fine with not having the ability to concentrate on something. If you don't fit that mold, you don't have a digital culture.
Microsoft has been publishing a lot of "DevOps journey" presentations lately, and the main thrust of them is this -- fire your testers, make the developers responsible for testing, and make the developers the operations team, responsible for anything they check in to production. Oh, and remove the quiet spaces and put your developers in developer pods.
My opinion of this is that not every company is ready to go full digital culture. Digital culture also implies that you have fiercely loyal developers who all smart, capable and will work insane hours without question, and that are fine with being bombarded by distractions all the time. When you're Microsoft or a web startup, you can afford to pay for these developers, or trick them into working those hours with stock options. You can also trick them into spending their entire lives connected to work by blurring the lines...give them 3 free meals a day to keep them in the office, and all the mobile productivity tools to keep them connected for the few hours they do go home.
Anyone who says we need to slow down and focus on quality over velocity is shouted down as a heretic these days. For some application types I agree...no one cares if they have to refresh Tinder or reconnect to Netflix, and the only client is a phone or web browser. For more critical stuff, or things that have components that can't be abstracted away too easily, I think the pendulum is going to come back a little bit after the bubble bursts. Right now, companies are deathly afraid of missing out and "digital transformation" consulting engagements are very lucrative. But like anything, I think it'll settle back to the middle...not every company is Facebook or Google.
It seems to me like absolutely zero male corporate executives, or basically anyone in a position of power, is going to escape this. In my career I've worked with tons of slimebag executives and type-A salespeople...and basically all of them have at least the potential to be involved in inappropriate behavior. It was just the way things were done previously.
I guess my question is when it's going to stop being front page news. Usually these things have a limited window of interest, but basically every male in a position of power is being called out it seems.
Given the dick behavior I've witnessed over the years, I can see it being somewhat uncomfortable...but all these accusers are going to be famous and get huge payouts regardless of how they felt. I do wonder one thing...would men complain if the situation were reversed? I don't know if I would.
When companies start showing off fancy real estate, or initiating a Hunger Games style race to the bottom for cities to be their next headquarters, it's a good sign the next bubble is coming to an end. Sun moved to a fancy new campus and were shortly bought by Oracle. There was an article a few momths ago about how Microsoft is building tree houses for their employees to work in. This is the second tech bubble I've lived through and the end always seems to be a new trend in office design.
I guess I'm old school. but I really don't like collaborative brightly colored preschool workspaces. I want a comfortable private workspace with decent temperature control and access to decent coffee/snacks. Even when I was younger I couldn't understand why people would voluntarily work crazy hours if an employer gave them a "fun" office environment.
The problem with the current office trend is that it's not easily undo-able. You can't easily go back from people crammed around cafeteria tables to even semi-private spaces without showing that it has a direct effect on productivity.
The truth is that almost any organization that isn't heavily regulated against doing so is putting at least _some_ data outside the corporate firewall in public clouds. Even if the official IT department doesn't realize it, it's definitely happening. It's rare these days to see companies with a defined perimeter that nothing leaks out of. Anyone who's doing Office 365 is doing Azure AD and logging in from remote. The days of securing a fixed boundary and trusting everything that makes it in are numbered.
Almost every corporate environment I've been in assumes that once something is behind the firewall, either VPNed in or connecting directly, it's trusted. That's a very bad assumption, and I think that's where "zero trust" networks come in. Even if it's degrees, like "I'm not going to implicitly trust every device that plugs into an internal switchport," it's better than nothing. Doing it right is hard though...and there are a lot of companies that just don't want to re-architect their networks to accomodate a posture of limited trust.
I'm one of those strange people who prefers a full time job, with a steady paycheck. I know the absolute dollar value for contracts in my field is higher than I get as an FTE, but everyone I know doing contract work is constantly hustling for a new job and never knows where their money will be coming from. I work for an IT services company so I get tons of exposure to different projects. I'm not sure I'd feel the same way if I didn't get work that varied often, but knowing you're going to be paid and can cover your expenses is a relief. I'm not a natural salesman, and really don't want to be looking for work again 2 weeks into a 3-month contract. We employ contractors in some positions where I work, and it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the contracting lifestyle overhearing them calling headhunters, juggling bills, etc.
People with families, houses and other fixed committments tend to favor steady income. Companies want a disposable, nomadic workforce that never puts down roots and can load their belongings into their car at a moment's notice. I'm strange in that I think it's a good idea for people to stick around, see their projects through, and get involved in the communities they live in. I know employer/employee loyalty is at an all-time low but it doesn't have to be. I think well-run companies that think long term (a minority, I know) don't really want a payroll full of mercenaries that they can't really count on. One of the best things that could happen through the tax code and accounting rules would be to encourage employment of FTEs over contractors. Right now, companies do everything they can to avoid hiring people because there's no incentive. If you made it so that retaining and paying employees is cheaper than a bunch of hired guns, lots of people would be much less stressed.
I think that once things get bad enough, you're going to start seeing things like potential parents having to prove an above-average or even superior IQ to avoid being sterilized. And when that isn't enough, everyone below a certain IQ is just going to get euthanized.
Universal income will never take hold until something like this has been tried, unfortunately. The US is too wrapped up in the Protestant work ethic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ethos and just plain greed. You'll never get the rich and intelligent classes to pay for the rest of society to live until there's a very good chance the guillotine will make a reappearance...or maybe even after.
I think that a lot of people who are just assuming everything is going to be OK with this next transition are going to be in for a surprise. Automation is also coming for knowledge workers, at all levels. Assume doctors didn't have an ironclad professional organization that will never allow them to be replaced or marginalized. Right now, the requirements for medical school are a photographic memory, a straight-A academic record and the ability to live through a rigorous training regime. With automation, that photographic memory is no longer as important because you don't need to have the entire body of medical knowledge in your brain. You also may be able to get away with accepting students with a 3.5 GPA or even lower. Salaries are going to drop overall because of facts like these.
In addition, consider the following very different, yet very similar hypothetical workers: - Factory worker in a well-paying part of the country, who has been placing Part A on Part B and tightening Bolt C (or some other assembly skill) for their entire working life since high school, and is at the top of their potential skill level - Big-company general office worker, who has been accepting email from Department A, performing work item B, and emailing the result to Department C since they got their Business Management degree from Big State University
Both of these workers are toast once automation comes for their jobs, and this time there's nothing they can be trained to do. Don't forget that we told the factory workers to go get office jobs, and we forced the office job holders through college for a generation or two.
It's not even "new money" in the aristocratic sense. Some of them may be getting large stock option grants or similar, but with SF/SV cost of living, it's not like they'll never have to worry about money ever agsin.
People are forgetting about the First Dotcom Bubble. Both SF and NYC were filled with paper millionaires back around 1999/2000. Only some escaped with their fortunes and once the bubble pops most of these Apple/Google employees will be back in the real world with the rest of us. Some might have a used 7-Series or a house to show for it., but most people riding the bubble are regular employees.
I think the bigger societal issue is the skills gap between the new rich and the soon-to-be destitute. There may be a time where you either work for one of the top tech firms or are in a permanent underclass. That's what the rock-throwers are addressing.
I really don't see why Google is the bad guy in this one. From a purely corporate standpoint, I'm sure the lawyers just told HR to get rid of him immediately -- considering the fact that hw was radioactive both internally and externally at that point. Plus, making the CEO come back from vacation is a pretty good way to ensure _someone_ gets fired, if not a whole swath of people.
Everyone on this thread is piling on people, calling them snowflakes or PC. If the choice is to have a civil society where obvious jerks are excluded from conversations, then I prefer PC. Going the other way, especially with the social media echo chamber, is going to lead to millions of loud-mouth, zero-filter Trump clones running around. Seriously, by Kindergarten most kids understand that they're not going to get far by being a bully, unless they happen to be the toughest bully on the playground. I read Damore's memo, and what I got from it is that he's criticizing Google's attempts at diversity because women wouldn't want to work there because they're biologically different. What's wrong with a little outreach when your employees are basically the entire Stanford CS department? Even diversity of thought would be a good thing.
The problem with something like this is that they're trying to extend the subscription model to everything. It's part of the physical goods makers' obsession with making consumers pay for a product over and over rather than owning it outright.
With rare exceptions, there are 2 types of people who buy BMWs: - People who "rent" them on a throwaway basis on 2/3-year business leases, who will only pay $160 or $240 to rent CarPlay access before they turn it back in for another one. Even if it was $500 a year, the people in this set probably wouldn't blink an eye. - People who buy them used because they like the cars, who will now not benefit from a pre-activiated CarPlay. Even many enthusiasts don't buy BMWs new...they're too expensive and it makes sense to let some doctor or real estate agent eat the depreciation.
BMW fans and Apple fans are also in the union part of that particular Venn diagram for the most part, so I'm really surprised they're doing this. Not really though...lately, they've been doing things like requiring that key parts like the battery be "programmed" by the dealer before they work, and basically any part with space for flash memory in it is a target for this too. (Adaptive headlight controllers are a good example.) I imagine that just like Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud, consumers will just accept paying and paying to use something they bought.
It's too bad they're continuing down this road. Infotainment and other electronics are already fiddly enough once they age sufficiently, and now you have to pay to access them.
I'm surprised the CEO isn't appearing on stage in black turtlenecks and jeans.
This just sounds like a paranoid, in-over-his-head dotcom era CEO running the place like his own personal empire. He's just trying to mimic the Steve Jobs personality...intense secrecy on products, over-the-top asshole personality, etc... So many people I've dealt with in executive positions are like this -- it's like they read a book in the airport bookstore telling them they need to act exactly like this CEO or that CEO, and just latch onto it for dear life, trying as hard as possible to pull it off.
Once you get beyond a certain level of intelligence, it's very plain to see that many high-IQ, academically-accomplished and super-smart individuals don't have emotional intelligence. To be an effective leader, you need at least some charisma, some ability to influence others, and likability...the more the better. This is why people tend to follow alpha-male types even if they're not super-brilliant. They don't want to be talked down to or made to feel stupid by someone who is much smarter than them and lets them know about it constantly. They want a used-car salesman, an ex-fraternity type who seems like they'd be down to party with them any time, and not a brilliant scientist who can't communicate effectively.
I'm by no means a super-genius, but on some matters I tend to know a little more than the average person I work with. What's gotten me farther than anything else in my career so far is the ability to explain things to people clearly without talking down or making them feel dumb. A counter-example is this -- I'm a systems engineer/architect type in a company doing traditional infrastructure deployments. Of course everyone's on the DevOps bandwagon like they were on the Agile bandwagon last decade, so we're adapting. OMFG, you have no idea how much the "DevOps Expert" crowd avoids explaining things clearly and back-handedly insults people. Like any group there are a mix of personalities but the really brilliant ones just seem to have little ability to explain things, assume everyone else is as smart as they are or just want to keep knowledge for themselves. Going from hand-building systems up from nothing to chaining together 500 strangely-named single-function open source tools to do the same thing is a big leap for a lot of people. I've been trying to impart the knowledge I've been gaining, and so far it's working...I should start a blog or something, but definitely not call it "DevOps for Dummies.":-)
What I find most interesting about this is that smartphones have become so critical to people's everyday lives in just 10 years, that a Congressional committee is taking steps to grill a major provider of said phones.
I'm an iPhone user and actually do like them. But, I really dislike the system that a duopoly has put in place. First, I can't switch to Android even if I want to without losing all the money I've invested in music, apps, etc. and having to re-buy collections on the other platform. Second, the restrictions Apple has placed on hardware lately are just crazy. Power users don't want throwaway appliances. Users who know what's up don't want to pay insanely inflated prices for flash memory. The planned obsolescence thing is understandable, but why in the world couldn't Apple just stick an SD slot under some Ive-ian waterproof door? They could even give it a dumb consumer-friendly name like "Escape Pod" or something.
The problem is that Apple knows that 90+% of its audience is absolutely brain-dead when it comes to technology and will just do what they tell them. While tech should be easy to use, it's gotten ridiculously easy to use in the smartphone era. Obviously Apple admitted to throttling the CPU, but they could just as easily have said. "Oh, that's because your average consumer-facing website is downloading 2 GB of JavaScript and images from 450 ad providers and tracking services, and executing it all on your 4-year old CPU."
When Congress starts setting up public inquiries about your product, it's no longer a niche thing.
I work with a generally older male crowd, and some of them are quite vocal about their views on gender. Some are borderline MRA/MGTOW types, having been taken to the cleaners in divorces, etc. None are old enough to be adults back in the 50s when barely any married woman worked outside the home, but certainly some are old enough to look upon that time with nostalgia. The major thing that separates these guys from Mr. Damore is that they don't use company resources to promote their views, and their views don't really affect the work of others. I have to listen to them, but in reality they're no different than your traditional conservative white male talk radio-quoting types. They still do their jobs and don't anger anyone enough to make them complain.
The thing that's different with Google is that I'm sure their legal counsel just told the executives to make the problem go away immediately. No company wants to deal with the expense of a lawsuit and the reputation hit of getting dragged into court because one of their employees is acting like a jerk. I know the company I work for would show me the door in 15 seconds if I personally caused any reputational damage, regardless of how internal the forum was, or how the information was leaked.
What I wonder is why the Aspergers/autism angle wasn't used instead. That's a legitimate protected class. I work with a lot of tech company employees, and outside of the SV startup brogrammer world, there are _a lot_ of non-neurotypical types working for vendors. Once you get below the product managers and feature designer types, the ones doing the super-low level stuff like writing kernel modules and device drivers aren't exactly extroverts. Going after Google for discriminating against disabled people is a lot less clickbait-y than "conservative white males."
I have a 7 year old and 4 year old. They have devices (not phones) but we don't let them use them forever. This is definitely an issue though...if we didn't limit what they did on these devices they would be on them to the exclusion of everything else. I can definitely see how smart devices are more addicting that TV or video games were for us. With TV, it's a totally one-way medium and even with the most expensive cable package you can buy there's only so much content available. Video games when most of us were kids are laughably primitive compared to immersive experiences we have today. So parents have to be in control, but it's not entirely a matter of parents being lazy.
Before parents throw stones, or worse, before non-parents throw stones, don't forget that not every family is alike. Some families have serious issues where parents are working 2 jobs, one parent isn't present or is totally checked out, or one or both parents is working an insane amount of hours because that's what their employer expects. And it's not about cost of devices either -- cheap Android tablets or phones are just as addicting as the iPhone X. I live in a reasonably decent neighborhood, and of course I've run into the zombie moms who are either addicted to their own smartphones or want to shut the kids up so mommy can have her wine or painkillers in peace. But, there is something to be said about instant access to all the content in the entire world hitting the same endorphin receptors that other addictive substances do.
The problem I have with arbitrary deadlines isn't really the date, although those can be unrealistic. It's the never-ending nagging of project managers. Anything that prevents them from checking the box they need to check or moving the date out on their Gantt chart is an immediate emergency that must be addressed by endless status meetings. The endless status meetings make the project later by tying people up discussing strategies to reduce the time something will take.
I think part of it is that PMs have been taught that, just like MBAs, they can project-manage anything. And I can see their methods when they make $100K+ and their sole job is to check those boxes, or nag nag nag until they are. But creative work on any complex project isn't like drywalling a commercial building. There are some things you can't rigidly schedule, but software development is treated exactly like a construction project.
I have noticed that the best project managers don't nag -- they're often the ones who've actually done the work before and aren't looking to throw you under the bus. The worst are the PMP clones. I seriously have had a couple PMs who are following the PMBOK line by line, using the PMI-approved terminology, and PMI-approved nagging/threatening techniques. That's the kind of PM you don't want.
You know what would be very interesting? Given Trump's paranoid tendencies, and his previous experience as a businessman in the very shady real estate industry, he might be recording all his conversations, Nixon-style. _Those_ would make for some very interesting listening. Business executives record their conversations all the time...they're used to being double-crossed.
Banning personal devices might limit recording, but every staffer he fires is going to get a book deal just based on their experience. One of the biggest leaks is the personal use of Twitter. Conversations like, "Mr. President, can you please refrain from telegraphing our foreign policy positions and your disposition to adversaries?" must be hard to have, especially when ignored.
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Some cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, etc. are so spread out that providing reasonable public transportation, even if people are paying, is impossible. Europe has dense urban cores in their cities, and even car-centric German cities haven't spread out so much that providing transportation is a problem. A place like Dallas with zero natural boundaries has spread out to hundreds of square miles. In cities like that, public transportation isn't generally used as a way to get to work...it connects low-income housing with places of employment, hospitals and shopping areas because that's where the limited funds are best spent.
Other US cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington are at least candidates. Metro NY has a decent regional transportation system...there are 3 commuter railroads and several suburban bus lines, and a good amount of development has grown up around the rail lines. And of course, the city itself has subways and buses. Unless they absolutely need their cars to get around during the day, or are super-wealthy and don't care about parking costs, most people who are working normal-schedule jobs take the train or bus into the city. In other cities, you'd need way more than free fares to get people out of their cars.
Fare revenue from public transportation doesn't come anywhere close to paying for the real cost of running the system. Getting rid of it would make it even harder to run, unless everyone decided that it was a public good and should be paid for with taxes or reduced spending on roads. Also, people would have to understand that they can't externalize the cost of living on a 3-acre lot in a super-far flung suburb...making bigger roads just encourages more sprawl-based development. And that's a lifestyle change I don't think most Americans can handle.
There are _tons_ of stock and other investing scams that get carried out under the eyes of financial regulatory agencies...but you can bet there would be tons more if there were no regulation. You have to admit it's pretty brazen to just disappear with investors' money, not even pulling a Mt. Gox and claiming they were "hacked."
I would imagine that most of the "investors" in this ICO either had tons of play-money Bitcoins they didn't care about losing, or were starry-eyed latecomers drawn in by the Bitcoin millionaire stories in the press. It sucks for both groups, but this is what bubbles and unregulated markets get you. Plenty of fraudsters exist in the stock market, but at least they have to follow some rules and make up a plausible scheme to take investors' money. ICOs where the founders disappear to some non-extradition country with millions of dollars and can't even get a slap on the wrist fine enforced on them are just licenses to steal.
I wonder if Microsoft is trying to get around a scaling problem. If every company on Earth switches to Office 365, and they're basically forcing everyone this way, then they will control at least a portion of identity/login for most of the world. They're doing this with Azure AD right now, with every company either in a cloud-based or federated trust with their own tenant. I'm sure Azure AD is designed in a way that there's no single point of attack that could leak all users' credentials, but maybe the point of decentralizing it is actually to get the storage part off their hands while still controlling the process.
Serverless Blockchain Containers orchestrated by Kubernetes and deployed by Jenkins, Terraform, Vagrant and friends are the savior the financial sector needs!!!!!! Buy CloudWeasel CI/CD today! Any workload, any toolchain, any cloud!
(OK, in all seriousness...if they're talking about mainframes and COBOL underpinning almost everything they do, I might agree.) This just sounds like a study by a consulting firm [[looks-- oh yes, it is!]] planting the seeds of doubt in executives' heads to get the purse strings loosened. Traditional companies are totally in Fear of Missing Out mode and the consulting companies are cashing in on that.
This was also back when they really had a hold on their employees and actually wanted to keep them. I know several people who retired from a lifetime employed with IBM. And you're right...Rochester, MN, Burlington, VT, Boulder, CO, etc, were designed to be isolated enough so IBM controlled the labor pool but close enough so corporate types in cities could easily fly or drive there.
It makes sense when you think about it, but only if your goal is to retain talent. I think Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and all the other big tech employers these days just want a revolving door. I even remember a time where companies paid to move you internally for promotions or new job assignments rather than lose you.
I'm guessing that the main reason people are complaining is that they think Google is going to further drive up rents in NYC. Living near NYC, I can tell you that's not possible. San Francisco/SV is the only real estate market that is crazier in the US. Unless you want to live in a shoebox 400 ft^2 apartment, the average worker isn't going to be buying Midtown Manhattan real estate.
Are they worried that there's going to be an influx of 50,000 Googlers who are going to be demanding $300K+ to work there? I can see that...but it's not going to change anything. NYC is the home of the investment banking industry, where kids fresh out of MBA school are making millions a year. There's celebrities, corporate executives, etc. and the place is just swimming in money. Google AND Amazon coming in might make a further dent, but I doubt it. All it'd do is make the already unobtainable real estate further out of reach.
For those who don't remember Dotcom Bubble 1.0, there was a sizable chunk of craziness in NYC, and it was dubbed Silicon Alley. This was because Bubble 1.0 was all about getting the traditional publishers and media companies hooked in. What I wonder is whether Bubble 2.0 has enough air left for Google's move to make any dent.
I think there's a bunch of factors at work.
- People working in Seattle, and SF/SV make tons of money because of that region's out-of-control housing market and other cost of living factors.
- If this is recent data, don't forget that this is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Large Seattle/SF/SV employers heavily favor younger workers and hip startup types. So, on average the age of people reporting high salaries will be lower, while their salaries will be comparatively higher. Microsoft and Amazon are throwing money at people who can spell DevOps and cloud, and the insane development cadence ensures that workers are younger. If you can handle "Seattle Hundreds" year in and year out, and save your money, you will make out until the bubble pops.
- The reality is that there is an upper limit to tech salaries no matter where you go. You have to be exceptional to get executive-level pay in places with normal cost of living. This either means you've invented something for the company, are literally holding the entire org together yourself, or are a consultant traveling 11 months out of the year deploying the newest hotness.
Now that I'm starting to hit that magic number (I'll be 45 in 2 years) this is starting to make sense. There is a constant downward pressure on wages and you have to stay relevant if you want to stay near the top. I like where I am in my career...I'm paid to keep up at a reasonable pace and enjoy being able to pass on wisdom to the new grads as they filter in. But no one should expect that they'll get beyond that cap, whatever it is for their specialty, unless they're willing to consult or hop jobs every six months for increases before the next recession hits.
Most taboos about suicide are religion-centric, but it's actually illegal to attempt and succeed. Why can't we just acknowledge that some people don't want to live anymore and actually help them out? Some obvious examples:
- Someone dealing with a terminal illness that will destroy them slowly over many painful years, or destroy their minds like dementia or Alzheimer's disease
- Someone facing a lifetime prison sentence
- Someone who's so badly depressed, unable to affect it via medication or other means, and just done with life.
Less obvious examples include what's coming next...unfortunately, we're entering an era where doing everything right, getting a good education and keeping out of trouble doesn't guarantee stability. I work at a company that has a lot of long-term employees, and they're starting to lay them off in their 50s. Imagine being 55, 4.5 years from the age where you can start using your retirement accounts penalty-free and 7 years from the age where you can start drawing your Social Security benefits. The job you've been at for 20+ years kicks you out, and no one wants to hire you because of your age. If you can't get SS disability or something similar, your life is going to be miserable from that point on. Suicides among this group are definitely going to spike once automation really comes for all the knowledge workers.
Speaking as someone who works in a fairly slow-moving industry, producing software and systems that are critical to keep running, I can say we have a low "digital culture" score. When I hear digital culture, the image in my head is of a Silicon Valley web startup, employees clustered around an open-space "developer pod" with constant distractions. Everything is full DevOps, with developers making major changes to the system several times a day. All the while, you have messages coming in from email, Slack, Trello, Microsoft Teams, IMs, text messages, etc. and developers are fine with not having the ability to concentrate on something. If you don't fit that mold, you don't have a digital culture.
Microsoft has been publishing a lot of "DevOps journey" presentations lately, and the main thrust of them is this -- fire your testers, make the developers responsible for testing, and make the developers the operations team, responsible for anything they check in to production. Oh, and remove the quiet spaces and put your developers in developer pods.
My opinion of this is that not every company is ready to go full digital culture. Digital culture also implies that you have fiercely loyal developers who all smart, capable and will work insane hours without question, and that are fine with being bombarded by distractions all the time. When you're Microsoft or a web startup, you can afford to pay for these developers, or trick them into working those hours with stock options. You can also trick them into spending their entire lives connected to work by blurring the lines...give them 3 free meals a day to keep them in the office, and all the mobile productivity tools to keep them connected for the few hours they do go home.
Anyone who says we need to slow down and focus on quality over velocity is shouted down as a heretic these days. For some application types I agree...no one cares if they have to refresh Tinder or reconnect to Netflix, and the only client is a phone or web browser. For more critical stuff, or things that have components that can't be abstracted away too easily, I think the pendulum is going to come back a little bit after the bubble bursts. Right now, companies are deathly afraid of missing out and "digital transformation" consulting engagements are very lucrative. But like anything, I think it'll settle back to the middle...not every company is Facebook or Google.
It seems to me like absolutely zero male corporate executives, or basically anyone in a position of power, is going to escape this. In my career I've worked with tons of slimebag executives and type-A salespeople...and basically all of them have at least the potential to be involved in inappropriate behavior. It was just the way things were done previously.
I guess my question is when it's going to stop being front page news. Usually these things have a limited window of interest, but basically every male in a position of power is being called out it seems.
Given the dick behavior I've witnessed over the years, I can see it being somewhat uncomfortable...but all these accusers are going to be famous and get huge payouts regardless of how they felt. I do wonder one thing...would men complain if the situation were reversed? I don't know if I would.
When companies start showing off fancy real estate, or initiating a Hunger Games style race to the bottom for cities to be their next headquarters, it's a good sign the next bubble is coming to an end. Sun moved to a fancy new campus and were shortly bought by Oracle. There was an article a few momths ago about how Microsoft is building tree houses for their employees to work in. This is the second tech bubble I've lived through and the end always seems to be a new trend in office design.
I guess I'm old school. but I really don't like collaborative brightly colored preschool workspaces. I want a comfortable private workspace with decent temperature control and access to decent coffee/snacks. Even when I was younger I couldn't understand why people would voluntarily work crazy hours if an employer gave them a "fun" office environment.
The problem with the current office trend is that it's not easily undo-able. You can't easily go back from people crammed around cafeteria tables to even semi-private spaces without showing that it has a direct effect on productivity.
The truth is that almost any organization that isn't heavily regulated against doing so is putting at least _some_ data outside the corporate firewall in public clouds. Even if the official IT department doesn't realize it, it's definitely happening. It's rare these days to see companies with a defined perimeter that nothing leaks out of. Anyone who's doing Office 365 is doing Azure AD and logging in from remote. The days of securing a fixed boundary and trusting everything that makes it in are numbered.
Almost every corporate environment I've been in assumes that once something is behind the firewall, either VPNed in or connecting directly, it's trusted. That's a very bad assumption, and I think that's where "zero trust" networks come in. Even if it's degrees, like "I'm not going to implicitly trust every device that plugs into an internal switchport," it's better than nothing. Doing it right is hard though...and there are a lot of companies that just don't want to re-architect their networks to accomodate a posture of limited trust.
I'm one of those strange people who prefers a full time job, with a steady paycheck. I know the absolute dollar value for contracts in my field is higher than I get as an FTE, but everyone I know doing contract work is constantly hustling for a new job and never knows where their money will be coming from. I work for an IT services company so I get tons of exposure to different projects. I'm not sure I'd feel the same way if I didn't get work that varied often, but knowing you're going to be paid and can cover your expenses is a relief. I'm not a natural salesman, and really don't want to be looking for work again 2 weeks into a 3-month contract. We employ contractors in some positions where I work, and it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the contracting lifestyle overhearing them calling headhunters, juggling bills, etc.
People with families, houses and other fixed committments tend to favor steady income. Companies want a disposable, nomadic workforce that never puts down roots and can load their belongings into their car at a moment's notice. I'm strange in that I think it's a good idea for people to stick around, see their projects through, and get involved in the communities they live in. I know employer/employee loyalty is at an all-time low but it doesn't have to be. I think well-run companies that think long term (a minority, I know) don't really want a payroll full of mercenaries that they can't really count on. One of the best things that could happen through the tax code and accounting rules would be to encourage employment of FTEs over contractors. Right now, companies do everything they can to avoid hiring people because there's no incentive. If you made it so that retaining and paying employees is cheaper than a bunch of hired guns, lots of people would be much less stressed.
I think that once things get bad enough, you're going to start seeing things like potential parents having to prove an above-average or even superior IQ to avoid being sterilized. And when that isn't enough, everyone below a certain IQ is just going to get euthanized.
Universal income will never take hold until something like this has been tried, unfortunately. The US is too wrapped up in the Protestant work ethic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ethos and just plain greed. You'll never get the rich and intelligent classes to pay for the rest of society to live until there's a very good chance the guillotine will make a reappearance...or maybe even after.
I think that a lot of people who are just assuming everything is going to be OK with this next transition are going to be in for a surprise. Automation is also coming for knowledge workers, at all levels. Assume doctors didn't have an ironclad professional organization that will never allow them to be replaced or marginalized. Right now, the requirements for medical school are a photographic memory, a straight-A academic record and the ability to live through a rigorous training regime. With automation, that photographic memory is no longer as important because you don't need to have the entire body of medical knowledge in your brain. You also may be able to get away with accepting students with a 3.5 GPA or even lower. Salaries are going to drop overall because of facts like these.
In addition, consider the following very different, yet very similar hypothetical workers:
- Factory worker in a well-paying part of the country, who has been placing Part A on Part B and tightening Bolt C (or some other assembly skill) for their entire working life since high school, and is at the top of their potential skill level
- Big-company general office worker, who has been accepting email from Department A, performing work item B, and emailing the result to Department C since they got their Business Management degree from Big State University
Both of these workers are toast once automation comes for their jobs, and this time there's nothing they can be trained to do. Don't forget that we told the factory workers to go get office jobs, and we forced the office job holders through college for a generation or two.
It's not even "new money" in the aristocratic sense. Some of them may be getting large stock option grants or similar, but with SF/SV cost of living, it's not like they'll never have to worry about money ever agsin.
People are forgetting about the First Dotcom Bubble. Both SF and NYC were filled with paper millionaires back around 1999/2000. Only some escaped with their fortunes and once the bubble pops most of these Apple/Google employees will be back in the real world with the rest of us. Some might have a used 7-Series or a house to show for it., but most people riding the bubble are regular employees.
I think the bigger societal issue is the skills gap between the new rich and the soon-to-be destitute. There may be a time where you either work for one of the top tech firms or are in a permanent underclass. That's what the rock-throwers are addressing.
I really don't see why Google is the bad guy in this one. From a purely corporate standpoint, I'm sure the lawyers just told HR to get rid of him immediately -- considering the fact that hw was radioactive both internally and externally at that point. Plus, making the CEO come back from vacation is a pretty good way to ensure _someone_ gets fired, if not a whole swath of people.
Everyone on this thread is piling on people, calling them snowflakes or PC. If the choice is to have a civil society where obvious jerks are excluded from conversations, then I prefer PC. Going the other way, especially with the social media echo chamber, is going to lead to millions of loud-mouth, zero-filter Trump clones running around. Seriously, by Kindergarten most kids understand that they're not going to get far by being a bully, unless they happen to be the toughest bully on the playground. I read Damore's memo, and what I got from it is that he's criticizing Google's attempts at diversity because women wouldn't want to work there because they're biologically different. What's wrong with a little outreach when your employees are basically the entire Stanford CS department? Even diversity of thought would be a good thing.
The problem with something like this is that they're trying to extend the subscription model to everything. It's part of the physical goods makers' obsession with making consumers pay for a product over and over rather than owning it outright.
With rare exceptions, there are 2 types of people who buy BMWs:
- People who "rent" them on a throwaway basis on 2/3-year business leases, who will only pay $160 or $240 to rent CarPlay access before they turn it back in for another one. Even if it was $500 a year, the people in this set probably wouldn't blink an eye.
- People who buy them used because they like the cars, who will now not benefit from a pre-activiated CarPlay. Even many enthusiasts don't buy BMWs new...they're too expensive and it makes sense to let some doctor or real estate agent eat the depreciation.
BMW fans and Apple fans are also in the union part of that particular Venn diagram for the most part, so I'm really surprised they're doing this. Not really though...lately, they've been doing things like requiring that key parts like the battery be "programmed" by the dealer before they work, and basically any part with space for flash memory in it is a target for this too. (Adaptive headlight controllers are a good example.) I imagine that just like Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud, consumers will just accept paying and paying to use something they bought.
It's too bad they're continuing down this road. Infotainment and other electronics are already fiddly enough once they age sufficiently, and now you have to pay to access them.
I'm surprised the CEO isn't appearing on stage in black turtlenecks and jeans.
This just sounds like a paranoid, in-over-his-head dotcom era CEO running the place like his own personal empire. He's just trying to mimic the Steve Jobs personality...intense secrecy on products, over-the-top asshole personality, etc... So many people I've dealt with in executive positions are like this -- it's like they read a book in the airport bookstore telling them they need to act exactly like this CEO or that CEO, and just latch onto it for dear life, trying as hard as possible to pull it off.
Once you get beyond a certain level of intelligence, it's very plain to see that many high-IQ, academically-accomplished and super-smart individuals don't have emotional intelligence. To be an effective leader, you need at least some charisma, some ability to influence others, and likability...the more the better. This is why people tend to follow alpha-male types even if they're not super-brilliant. They don't want to be talked down to or made to feel stupid by someone who is much smarter than them and lets them know about it constantly. They want a used-car salesman, an ex-fraternity type who seems like they'd be down to party with them any time, and not a brilliant scientist who can't communicate effectively.
I'm by no means a super-genius, but on some matters I tend to know a little more than the average person I work with. What's gotten me farther than anything else in my career so far is the ability to explain things to people clearly without talking down or making them feel dumb. A counter-example is this -- I'm a systems engineer/architect type in a company doing traditional infrastructure deployments. Of course everyone's on the DevOps bandwagon like they were on the Agile bandwagon last decade, so we're adapting. OMFG, you have no idea how much the "DevOps Expert" crowd avoids explaining things clearly and back-handedly insults people. Like any group there are a mix of personalities but the really brilliant ones just seem to have little ability to explain things, assume everyone else is as smart as they are or just want to keep knowledge for themselves. Going from hand-building systems up from nothing to chaining together 500 strangely-named single-function open source tools to do the same thing is a big leap for a lot of people. I've been trying to impart the knowledge I've been gaining, and so far it's working...I should start a blog or something, but definitely not call it "DevOps for Dummies." :-)
What I find most interesting about this is that smartphones have become so critical to people's everyday lives in just 10 years, that a Congressional committee is taking steps to grill a major provider of said phones.
I'm an iPhone user and actually do like them. But, I really dislike the system that a duopoly has put in place. First, I can't switch to Android even if I want to without losing all the money I've invested in music, apps, etc. and having to re-buy collections on the other platform. Second, the restrictions Apple has placed on hardware lately are just crazy. Power users don't want throwaway appliances. Users who know what's up don't want to pay insanely inflated prices for flash memory. The planned obsolescence thing is understandable, but why in the world couldn't Apple just stick an SD slot under some Ive-ian waterproof door? They could even give it a dumb consumer-friendly name like "Escape Pod" or something.
The problem is that Apple knows that 90+% of its audience is absolutely brain-dead when it comes to technology and will just do what they tell them. While tech should be easy to use, it's gotten ridiculously easy to use in the smartphone era. Obviously Apple admitted to throttling the CPU, but they could just as easily have said. "Oh, that's because your average consumer-facing website is downloading 2 GB of JavaScript and images from 450 ad providers and tracking services, and executing it all on your 4-year old CPU."
When Congress starts setting up public inquiries about your product, it's no longer a niche thing.
I work with a generally older male crowd, and some of them are quite vocal about their views on gender. Some are borderline MRA/MGTOW types, having been taken to the cleaners in divorces, etc. None are old enough to be adults back in the 50s when barely any married woman worked outside the home, but certainly some are old enough to look upon that time with nostalgia. The major thing that separates these guys from Mr. Damore is that they don't use company resources to promote their views, and their views don't really affect the work of others. I have to listen to them, but in reality they're no different than your traditional conservative white male talk radio-quoting types. They still do their jobs and don't anger anyone enough to make them complain.
The thing that's different with Google is that I'm sure their legal counsel just told the executives to make the problem go away immediately. No company wants to deal with the expense of a lawsuit and the reputation hit of getting dragged into court because one of their employees is acting like a jerk. I know the company I work for would show me the door in 15 seconds if I personally caused any reputational damage, regardless of how internal the forum was, or how the information was leaked.
What I wonder is why the Aspergers/autism angle wasn't used instead. That's a legitimate protected class. I work with a lot of tech company employees, and outside of the SV startup brogrammer world, there are _a lot_ of non-neurotypical types working for vendors. Once you get below the product managers and feature designer types, the ones doing the super-low level stuff like writing kernel modules and device drivers aren't exactly extroverts. Going after Google for discriminating against disabled people is a lot less clickbait-y than "conservative white males."
I have a 7 year old and 4 year old. They have devices (not phones) but we don't let them use them forever. This is definitely an issue though...if we didn't limit what they did on these devices they would be on them to the exclusion of everything else. I can definitely see how smart devices are more addicting that TV or video games were for us. With TV, it's a totally one-way medium and even with the most expensive cable package you can buy there's only so much content available. Video games when most of us were kids are laughably primitive compared to immersive experiences we have today. So parents have to be in control, but it's not entirely a matter of parents being lazy.
Before parents throw stones, or worse, before non-parents throw stones, don't forget that not every family is alike. Some families have serious issues where parents are working 2 jobs, one parent isn't present or is totally checked out, or one or both parents is working an insane amount of hours because that's what their employer expects. And it's not about cost of devices either -- cheap Android tablets or phones are just as addicting as the iPhone X. I live in a reasonably decent neighborhood, and of course I've run into the zombie moms who are either addicted to their own smartphones or want to shut the kids up so mommy can have her wine or painkillers in peace. But, there is something to be said about instant access to all the content in the entire world hitting the same endorphin receptors that other addictive substances do.
The problem I have with arbitrary deadlines isn't really the date, although those can be unrealistic. It's the never-ending nagging of project managers. Anything that prevents them from checking the box they need to check or moving the date out on their Gantt chart is an immediate emergency that must be addressed by endless status meetings. The endless status meetings make the project later by tying people up discussing strategies to reduce the time something will take.
I think part of it is that PMs have been taught that, just like MBAs, they can project-manage anything. And I can see their methods when they make $100K+ and their sole job is to check those boxes, or nag nag nag until they are. But creative work on any complex project isn't like drywalling a commercial building. There are some things you can't rigidly schedule, but software development is treated exactly like a construction project.
I have noticed that the best project managers don't nag -- they're often the ones who've actually done the work before and aren't looking to throw you under the bus. The worst are the PMP clones. I seriously have had a couple PMs who are following the PMBOK line by line, using the PMI-approved terminology, and PMI-approved nagging/threatening techniques. That's the kind of PM you don't want.
You know what would be very interesting? Given Trump's paranoid tendencies, and his previous experience as a businessman in the very shady real estate industry, he might be recording all his conversations, Nixon-style. _Those_ would make for some very interesting listening. Business executives record their conversations all the time...they're used to being double-crossed.
Banning personal devices might limit recording, but every staffer he fires is going to get a book deal just based on their experience. One of the biggest leaks is the personal use of Twitter. Conversations like, "Mr. President, can you please refrain from telegraphing our foreign policy positions and your disposition to adversaries?" must be hard to have, especially when ignored.